The Firefighter

Chapter 14 - The Recovery

Once unpacked at the sheep farm, Oliver looked more relaxed and took to walking around the farm to keep healthy and breathe in the fresh air. Sometimes he would stand on the edge of the dam on the farm and gaze at the water as if remembering something. However, his detailed memories hadn't come back. He had to start again with forming relationships with everyone, including Charlotte. When he tried to remember what he had thought about her before, he couldn't remember. Was it just friendship or was it more? He certainly felt a deep longing to be near her as often as possible. Maybe the new him, was falling in love with the old Charlotte.

Oliver and Charlotte saw each other a great deal on the farm as she would come over to the larger farmhouse and cook and bake for the family. They were like a nuclear family except that there were no blood ties between them, only lifetimes of caring for each other. The twins loved their grandfather and spent time playing with him and running after the sheep.

The flocks of sheep had grown fast and Charlotte had decided to sell some of them so that her lands didn't get overgrazed. She was thinking of bringing llamas and alpacas onto the farm as many Australian farms had found the benefit of raising these animals to be a worthwhile endeavour. So, Charlotte invested in ten llamas from another rural part of New South Wales and let them loose in their own pen. They were well behaved on the whole except for a bit of spitting between them when they became angry. When the llama hair was harvested, she had coasters and clothing made from the soft hair. Her favourite item of clothing was a soft scarf made from llama hair.

One day, Charlotte and Oliver were taking an evening stroll around the farm when they found two of the llamas mating. Charlotte giggled as she hadn't seen them do that before and she thought that all her llamas were of the female gender. It turned out that there was a single male llama and before long, he had all the female llamas pregnant. Charlotte's llama herd began to grow. To avoid in-breeding, she decided to exchange some of the llamas with the other farmers in the local area and used horse boxes to transfer them between farms. Oliver seemed to love the llamas as well.

The llama diet that they were fed was Nutrena Country Feed and the llamas seemed to love the balance of the food and nutrients. Jimmy grumbled that the llama feed was costing too much, but he could appreciate that the llamas were a valuable addition to the farm.

Charlotte didn't like having to send the lambs and llamas off to the slaughterhouse. She had been a vegetarian for most of her life and ensured that the eggs that she ate came from free range chickens. She abhorred cruelty to animals and took great care of their animals on the farm. Charlotte wished that she could run a farm that didn't need to sell the animals to make a profit, but the crops didn't provide enough income in such a dry climate. As a teenager, she had campaigned against animal cruelty and still had strong feelings about it. Oliver shared her views.